, linguistics and corpus linguistics

Abstract

The field of corpus linguistics is commonly regarded as a new approach to linguistics which has developed and become popular over the past forty years – since the development of computers. Like all new fields, however, its roots lie in earlier forms of the discipline. This paper addresses one of the forebears of this field, Charles C. Fries. He thought of himself simply as a linguist (not a corpus linguist); yet his theory and practice have much in common with current versions of corpus linguistics. Fries’s approach to linguistics and to the use of corpora in linguistics grew out of his background, as well as the goals and functions of theory that he adopted for his linguistics. This background and these goals led him to adopt a number of themes that permeated his work throughout his career: 1. Because his interests in language and linguistics grew out of his early work teaching classical Greek and then English composition, his theory had a very practical basis in that it grew out of the problems encountered in pursuing these (and similar) practical tasks. 2. He valued the scientific goals of making predictions of disparate phenomena. In linguistics, he took as his goal the description of language in such a way that he could identify the signals in the language that would lead listeners to interpret the language the way that they do. That is, he tried identify the signals that would allow him to predict listener responses. 3. He emphasized items in contrast – the paradigmatic relations among linguistic elements. 4. He considered the spoken language to be primary. 5. In science, all analyses should be reliable and replicable. If linguistics was to be scientific, this required that all descriptions be based on some explicit body of evidence – a corpus, or body of language being used by people for real purposes. 6. The data gathered and analyzed should represent the language of some community. ICAME Journal No. 34 90 7. The analysis must be exhaustive and systematic. Preferably these analyses should include relative frequency counts of patterns in contrast, where the comparison of the patterns is based on similarities of meaning. The paper ends with an evaluation of several aspects of Fries’s work.